07-24-2008
One thing that eval does that is critical is break things apart in strings. For example if in a script you wrote lscommand="ls -F", then tried to run $lscommand, the shell would give you an amusing error that it didn't find the command ls -F. If instead you eval $lscommand, it works fine. One place I use that a lot is in a script where some args are to be passed to a command (or commands). I gather them together in variable, such as lsoptions="$lsoptions $arg" At the end of dealing with the arguments, the lsoptions might have for example, "-F -a". If I try to run ls $lsoptions ls will complain about the argument "-F -a" (and you'll get really odd incomprehensible complaints too! If instead, I do eval ls $lsoptions it does just what I wanted. Yea!
Patrick
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eval(n) Tcl Built-In Commands eval(n)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
NAME
eval - Evaluate a Tcl script
SYNOPSIS
eval arg ?arg ...?
_________________________________________________________________
DESCRIPTION
Eval takes one or more arguments, which together comprise a Tcl script containing one or more commands. Eval concatenates all its argu-
ments in the same fashion as the concat command, passes the concatenated string to the Tcl interpreter recursively, and returns the result
of that evaluation (or any error generated by it). Note that the list command quotes sequences of words in such a way that they are not
further expanded by the eval command.
EXAMPLES
Often, it is useful to store a fragment of a script in a variable and execute it later on with extra values appended. This technique is
used in a number of places throughout the Tcl core (e.g. in fcopy, lsort and trace command callbacks). This example shows how to do this
using core Tcl commands:
set script {
puts "logging now"
lappend $myCurrentLogVar
}
set myCurrentLogVar log1
# Set up a switch of logging variable part way through!
after 20000 set myCurrentLogVar log2
for {set i 0} {$i<10} {incr i} {
# Introduce a random delay
after [expr {int(5000 * rand())}]
update ;# Check for the asynch log switch
eval $script $i [clock clicks]
}
Note that in the most common case (where the script fragment is actually just a list of words forming a command prefix), it is better to |
use {*}$script when doing this sort of invocation pattern. It is less general than the eval command, and hence easier to make robust in |
practice. The following procedure acts in a way that is analogous to the lappend command, except it inserts the argument values at the
start of the list in the variable:
proc lprepend {varName args} {
upvar 1 $varName var
# Ensure that the variable exists and contains a list
lappend var
# Now we insert all the arguments in one go
set var [eval [list linsert $var 0] $args]
}
However, the last line would now normally be written without eval, like this: |
set var [linsert $var 0 {*}$args] |
SEE ALSO
catch(n), concat(n), error(n), interp(n), list(n), namespace(n), subst(n), tclvars(n), uplevel(n)
KEYWORDS
concatenate, evaluate, script
Tcl eval(n)